Officials in New Orleans this week edged closer to establishing a one-stop shop that parents can use to enroll their children in any of the city's public schools, hoping to simplify life for families and ensure that open-enrollment public schools really welcome all students.

A pair of decisions by the state and local school boards, which have divided responsibility for governing schools in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina, may eventually bring all public schools into a new enrollment system known as the OneApp, but in some cases, not for several years.

The idea is to cut back on the hassle and paperwork involved in enrolling students in a city dominated by independent charter schools, all of which used to handle enrollment on their own, and to squelch rumors that some schools weed out certain students.

First, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, gave preliminary approval to folding all state-approved charter schools in New Orleans into the OneApp by the 2014-15 school year.

That change, voted on in committee during a meeting in New Orleans on Wednesday, means all charter schools operating in the state-run Recovery District, as well as the three outlying charter schools in the parish, known as Type 2 charters, must participate. RSD charters already use the OneApp, but the Type 2 charters do not.

District officials acknowledge that adding Type 2 charters will involve addressing a number of issues. Type 2 schools are like other charters in that they receive public funding and operate autonomously, but they often have specialized missions that could complicated any effort to shoehorn them into one enrollment system.

For instance, Col. W. Davis, the commandant at a Type 2 charter called the New Orleans Military & Maritime Academy, pointed out to the board that all Type 2 charters by law must take students from any parish, a unique requirement, and that his school in particular sets aside 20 percent of its seats for dependents of military members.

Davis said the school has talked with RSD officials about how those factors might be incorporated into the OneApp but has not yet seen the details hammered out. "We didn't hear from them in a month and all of a sudden it's on the board agenda," Davis said.

Gabriela Fighetti, the Recovery School District's head of enrollment, defended going ahead with the policy change anyway. Fighetti said she was confident that the district can incorporate the special conditions required for Type 2 schools, particularly considering that the shift wouldn't actually happen until the 2014 academic year. But she didn't object when board member Chas Roemer, of Baton Rouge, suggested adding an April deadline for district officials to return with more details.

A day after the BESE vote, which is likely to be ratified by the full board next month, the Orleans Parish School Board took the first step toward placing its own charter schools within the OneApp as well.

The local board, which governs about 18 of the city's 90 or so schools, had already voted to include its six traditional campuses in the OneApp for next year, but felt that it didn't have the legal authority to force the dozen charter schools under its authority to join. Officials with both districts have made public appeals asking the board's charters to come aboard, but none have committed to doing so.

However, every charter school has to go back to its authorizer every few years for a renewal of its contract, and the board began considering policy language in committee on Thursday that would make any charter renewal contingent on participating in a central enrollment system. The board will formally vote on the policy in December after a 30-day discussion period.

The hitch, of course, is that some of the board's charters were renewed recently and won't have to come back to the board for years, in some cases not until 2021. In the meantime, a new slate of board members with different inclinations could well have struck the OneApp requirement from its policy.

Even so, Lee Reid, who represents most of the board's charters as an attorney for the East Bank Collaborative of Charter Schools, asked the board to soften the policy slightly by replacing the word "shall" with "may" in the sentence "shall be required to participate."

OPSB Member Lourdes Moran

The idea drew a sharp response from Lourdes Moran, who is serving out the last two months of her second term on the board after losing in this month's elections. Moran argued that giving any future board the extra wiggle room only leaves open the option of a less transparent enrollment process for the district's charters. "You're giving this elected body the opportunity to hang itself," she said.

Separately, the state school board voted to extend the deadline by about a month for schools that want to transfer out of the Recovery School District and go back under control of the local Orleans Parish School Board.

In all, 13 charter schools qualified to make the transfer this year, having notched high enough performance scores. But the charter boards that govern each school have to vote on taking that step and notify BESE by Dec. 1 to be able to transfer by next school year. And in light of a relatively late announcement of the most recent performance scores, state officials proposed a new deadline of Jan. 7.

In its recommendation to the board, the state Department of Education argued, "Delaying the return notification deadline will allow these schools to have more time to meet and discuss the decision with parents, community, and the Orleans Parish School Board."